Juvenile Nonsense: Fatties of the world, unite!

A big, sweaty, flabby revolution is coming. As soon as it catches its breath.

My brothers and sisters in fatness, it’s time for us to waddle up from our Rascal Scooters and take a stand against a grave injustice being perpetrated against us.

(By the way, if you are not one of my brothers or sisters in fatness, please stop reading now and go jog, or whatever it is you skinny freaks do.)

I first became aware of this grave injustice during a trip to the mall, which is a great place to look for injustice as they also sell cinnamon rolls. It doesn’t help with looking for injustice; they’re just really tasty.

I was there to shop for clothes and kill three or four hours not being outside, which is an area well known for its hostilities toward the portly. Especially lately, with temperatures reaching the point where it’s no longer feasible to eat a candy bar outside.

So there I am at the mall, browsing the racks at some men’s store or another (you know the one, with the walls covered in giant posters of hairless clothing models cavorting in the surf, pretending to play acoustic guitars around a campfire and basically doing everything in the world but modeling clothes). I decide the time has come to pull the trigger on a new pair of shorts, as all of mine are adorned with tiny footprints and various food stains from my son, who has made it his life mission to ruin all my things.

To my complete lack of shock, they don’t stock shorts in my size.

No big deal; the anti-fatty agenda of a lot of these hip boutiques is one of the most poorly-guarded secrets in the fashion industry. (Another one: losers on “America’s Next Top Model” are promptly eaten by the remaining contestants.)

Not expecting to find anything, I make my way over to the shirts. I need a new shirt because my wardrobe of shirts consists of a 60/40 mixture of A) T-shirts I’ve received as prizes for various eating contests and B) polo shirts that only fit as long as I don’t do something silly like move my arms.

I’ve started worrying that maybe my torso is getting longer as I age, because I seem to have a lot of polo shirts that used to fit just fine, but now suddenly reach my belly button if I raise my arms over my head (not that I have much reason to do that, unless there’s a box of cookies on the top shelf or something).

So I start browsing the shirts with one hand, using the other to hold the hem of my shirt down, when I come across something I’d thought was only a myth. It’s a shirt from the hip trendy clothing company, and the tag says XL.

The heavens open, the angels sing and I reach up with both hands to grab my prize (as the hem of my shirt slips up around my neck).

The angels stop singing the second I get the thing into the changing room and try it on. The mirror shows I am now wearing clothing that seems tailored for your standard Cabbage Patch doll. You know when you pop open the side of a tube of crescent rolls? There’s your mental image. My apologies.

That’s when I consider this shirt I’m almost wearing, and the grave injustice it represents. XL stands for extra large, right? I know this, you know this. I’m willing to bet the stick figures who run the hip trendy clothing company know this. So why not go ahead and make the darn shirt extra large if you’re going to put XL on the tag?

If I go to Wal-Mart and buy an XL T-shirt, it will fit me. If I get a complimentary XL “I ate the old 96er” T-shirt for devouring a six-pound steak, it will fit me after a few potty breaks. So why doesn’t the hip trendy clothing company’s XL T-shirt fit me?

Because, simply put, the hip trendy clothing company is trying to tell us fatties to lose weight. Well hip trendy clothing company, we chunky-style citizens have something to say about that.

Last time I checked, this was America. The land that invented cholesterol. The land whose massive 48-ounce sodas scoff at the rest of the world’s tiny cup holders. The land where Wendy’s closes late and IHOP opens early.

If the founding fathers were alive today, they would lay into a thick rack of ribs with a healthy coat of EZ-cheese and thank the maker that invented a country where KFC can make a sandwich that actually consists of two sandwiches glued together with congealed bacon grease.

So, don’t try to sell us a false bill of goods, hip trendy clothing company. If you’re going to sell us an XL T-shirt, it had damn well better be extra large (and resistant to pizza sauce stains, if you can swing it).

Correct this injustice, or my brothers and sisters in fatness will raise our voices as one in protest. Just not our arms, because our polo shirts will ride up.

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